Aida was so shocked he couldn’t speak for a long time, and the expressions of the two trusted disciples behind him were even worse.
“Then… is there no way now? Is there a way to find out who he gave the Mirror Heart to?”
“Difficult,” Maha said, “The Yata no Kagami contains the divine power of Amaterasu Omikami; in terms of divine rank, it’s on the same level as my mother. To track it, I must first establish a spiritual connection with the Yata no Kagami, which is difficult.”
Aida gasped for a long time, then looked back at the two disciples, whose faces were even paler than his.
“…Please allow me to consult with the disciples of the sect for a moment.” Aida turned and bowed deeply to Maha, trembling as he said, “I will return shortly. Please wait a moment, Your Highness.”
Maha gave him an indifferent expression.
Aida was opinionated and had nothing to discuss with his disciples. His temporary retreat was merely to think about how to persuade Maha to go to great lengths to help him find the Yata no Kagami, and what heavy price he would have to pay in exchange once he succeeded.
After being repatriated to Japan, he used all the resources at his disposal to investigate rumors about the Peacock Wisdom King and discovered that he had encountered a textbook example of a tyrannical deity. Probably because of a mix of demonic blood, the Peacock harbored deep hostility towards everyone except his mother, the Peacock Wisdom King, and was inherently jealous. He even charged into the Arupa-dhatu and swallowed the Buddha’s body in one gulp due to his mother’s excessive devotion to the gods.
In fact, compared to other deities, the Peacock Wisdom King was relatively easy to summon—this was probably because he grew up in the snow mountains and had a stronger sense of identification with the human world.
However, ever since he came to the Tantric Sect, the damaged property and collapsed buildings were nothing compared to the fact that he treated the Tantric Sect as a cafeteria!
Aida had previously prepared eighty-eight living human sacrifices for him—people bought from the black market and smuggled from overseas. But for some reason, Maha just wouldn’t eat what was prepared for him. Instead, he ate whatever he pleased for every meal, grabbing any Tantric disciple he found pleasing and devouring them on the spot, regardless of anything, leaving behind blood and remains before wiping his mouth and leaving.
Last week, after he ate several Tantric elders, Aida was finally forced to negotiate with Maha under the intense pressure from the elders, demanding that he stop eating Japanese people.
However, for Maha, there was no distinction between Japanese or non-Japanese; it was simply a matter of whether they looked delicious or not. When Aida said this, it immediately struck a nerve with Maha, and the irritable Peacock Wisdom King nearly disemboweled and dismembered Aida on the spot. Aida struggled with all his might to escape death and afterwards had to offer a large number of sacrifices to barely quell the Peacock Wisdom King’s anger.
So now the situation was even more delicate. How could they persuade this infamous fierce deity to help the Tantric Sect track down the Mirror Heart of the Yata no Kagami?
Maha could probably guess the Japanese’s dilemma, but he didn’t care. The Peacock Wisdom King sat bored on the altar, and with a few loud crashes, Candy Crush once again resulted in “Game Failed.”
Maha heavily crumpled the phone into a ball of scrap metal and casually tossed it aside. He habitually reached out to Aida for a new phone, then suddenly remembered Aida wasn’t there.
The great hall was empty, and candlelight flickered with golden light around the opulent altar.
By the white jade platform, the fiend deeply buried its head in its chest, fearing that if it was not careful, its thousand years of cultivation would make it an occasional after-dinner snack for the Peacock Wisdom King.
Maha felt immensely bored and his gaze casually drifted around, suddenly falling upon the unconscious Yan Lanyu.
In the flickering candlelight, Yan Lanyu’s eyes were closed tightly, and his breathing was steady, like a quiet doll.
“…Hmm.”
Maha had been enjoying eating humans recently, so unlike when he was in the Blood Sea, his first reaction upon seeing a human wasn’t to eat them. Instead, he unusually felt playful. Seeing Yan Lanyu’s cheek, white as jade in the candlelight, he casually poked it heavily.
Outside the main hall, Zhou Hui whispered, “What are you waiting for? Just go in, KO Maha, grab the person, and run.”
Chu He, however, stopped him. “No, no… wait.”
On the altar, Maha blinked, seemingly finding the soft, elastic texture somewhat amusing.
He began poking left and right, sometimes gently, sometimes heavily. After poking eleven or twelve times, one side of Yan Lanyu’s face was red, like a ripe apple.
Maha’s playfulness soared. He had a sudden flash of inspiration, sat down boldly on the white jade platform, and began braiding Yan Lanyu’s hair into small pigtails.
Zhou Hui: “…”
Chu He: “…”
The couple looked as if they had been struck by lightning. Zhou Hui stammered, “What’s going on? Does this kid have some special fetish? Is he playing with a real-life BJD doll?!”
Chu He’s face showed an expression of having a new world opened to him. He was stunned for a long time before he finally came to his senses: “No… Feline animals will play with their prey before eating it. It must be a habit inherited from you… right… wait!”
Zhou Hui got up to rush in, but was once again stopped by Chu He.
At the same time, the side door of the main hall creaked open, and Aida entered with his trusted disciples, bowing respectfully to Maha: “Your Highness Wisdom King, is there any way to temporarily awaken Yan Lanyu so that we can force him to reveal the whereabouts of the Mirror Heart?”
After saying this, he looked up and finally saw what Maha was doing, and his expression immediately became bewildered.
“Can’t be done,” Maha said nonchalantly amidst the collective shocked stares of the others, feeling nothing out of place.
“Wh-what…”
“He wrapped half of his worldly soul around the Mirror Heart and gave it to someone, only retaining a very small portion of his worldly soul and a complete underworld soul to sustain his daily activities. The advantage of this is that it maximally protects the Mirror Heart and prevents the recipient from rejecting it; at the same time, it actually doesn’t have much impact on himself, as the small amount of worldly soul he retained is sufficient for daily life.”
Maha paused, then looked at his work with an appreciative gaze. Perhaps feeling that the pigtail tied on top of Yan Lanyu’s head wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, he untied it and re-tied it at the back of his head.
“But the problem is, the fiend is strongly yin-natured—when the fiend occupied this young man’s body, it severely corroded his remaining worldly soul, which caused his current unconscious state. With no soul, of course he can’t be woken up.”
Aida didn’t even care about Maha’s shocking behavior and eagerly asked, “Doesn’t he still have an underworld soul?”
“Have some common sense, alright? An underworld soul is the soul of the deceased, normally in a state of chaos. And the underworld soul has suffered immensely in hell, through mountains of knives and seas of fire. If forcibly awakened, it would be equivalent to—”
Maha’s voice suddenly trailed off, and he stepped back half a pace.
Aida didn’t react at first, then looked past Maha’s figure and was astonished to see Yan Lanyu’s arm twitching on the white jade platform.
The frequency of his body’s twitching became increasingly violent; it could almost be called a seizure. Several blue veins bulged from his skin, then, like living snakes, they writhed and stretched beneath his skin, spreading all the way to his face.
His eyes were tightly shut, and his face contorted in spasms. His entire body arched as if in immense pain, emitting gasping sounds.
“What’s going on?” Aida asked in astonishment.
Yan Lanyu gripped the edge of the white jade platform tightly, his knuckles making terrifying cracking sounds. His body slowly sat up inch by inch, his face twitching from intense pain, appearing extremely distorted in the flickering shadows of the candlelight.
“Hoo… hoo…”
He fell to the ground with a thud, then staggered to his feet, opening blood-red eyes.
Maha flashed aside and said calmly, “…equivalent to a vengeful spirit returning to life.”
The next second, Yan Lanyu rushed off the altar, brushed past Maha, and charged directly at Aida, throwing himself at him and violently knocking him to the ground!
Aida roared. The disciples rushed forward to grab Yan Lanyu, but it was completely useless. Yan Lanyu let out a shrill, spine-chilling roar. With a fierce claw, he instantly tore off a chunk of flesh, blood and all, from Aida Yoshi’s chest, along with fragments of his clothes!
Aida cried out in astonishment and pain, and the disciples collectively let out gasps and roars of anger!
A piercing howl echoed through the empty shrine, as if a hurricane swept in from all directions, carrying a foul, putrid stench, as if countless vengeful spirits were clinging to everyone’s ears, wailing shrilly.
“It’s… it’s ghosts,” a disciple trembled, “All ghosts!”
That moment was utter chaos. Aida and Yan Lanyu struggled violently, the former’s face covered in blood, looking ferociously distorted; the latter, however, roared like he was possessed by a vengeful spirit, his nails deeply embedded in the flesh of Aida’s neck.
The Tantric disciples, while flailing their arms to dispel the swarming ghosts in the void, rushed forward to try and grab Yan Lanyu. But the first one to charge hadn’t even reached him when Yan Lanyu grabbed his hand and snapped his wrist with a crack!
The disciple let out a deafening scream. Aida seized the opportunity to pull out a talisman from the void, which ignited with a faint blue flame amidst his roar, and slapped it onto Yan Lanyu’s forehead with a thwack.
However, Yan Lanyu immediately tore off the talisman, and as if enraged, bit off a piece of flesh from the disciple’s broken arm!
“What’s going on?!” Aida’s voice was completely distorted. “Your Highness! Your Highness Wisdom King!”
Maha thoughtfully pinched his chin and said leisurely, “So this is an underworld soul… How did you Tantric Sect refine it? How did it become so full of resentment?”
“Your Highness!”
“Strange, how could it suddenly awaken? Could it be summoned by my boundless divine power?”
“—Your Highness!”
Aida’s voice was almost inhuman. He desperately threw out a handful of talismans blazing with fire, but then, Yan Lanyu, with his bloody hand, snatched them, crumpled them into a ball, shoved them into his mouth, and swallowed them whole!
The disciples were almost completely stunned, one of them nearly fell to his knees on the spot!
“But you also need to reflect on yourself. Look, he’s only targeting you, not anyone else, which means it’s still your problem,” Maha evaluated with great rationality and objectivity. Then, he pushed a square black frame from the air, which floated towards Yan Lanyu’s head.
The black frame rapidly expanded, like a bottomless black sack, and enveloped Yan Lanyu.
—That was actually a special space created by Maha, equivalent to a void independent of the Six Paths, dark and empty inside.
His original intention was just to let the underworld soul stay in there for a while, and then find a way to knock Yan Lanyu out again. However, for some reason, Yan Lanyu suddenly burst out with unimaginable explosive power, directly grabbing the edge of the space rift, and letting out an angry shriek!
The Tantric disciples stumbled backward, and blood directly burst from Aida’s ears.
That sound wasn’t coming from Yan Lanyu alone, but was resonating through countless voids, a ghostly wail filled with resentment, unwillingness, anger, and pain!
Maha’s gaze suddenly fixed on the outside of the hall, and he murmured, “—Not good.”
No one noticed what he said, but just as his words fell, the ground suddenly shook.
A hurricane-like airflow descended from the sky, and a tremendous roar, like a tidal wave, indicated the approach of a thousand armies and ten thousand horses.
The roof of the shrine gradually emitted creaking sounds as the supporting structure was put under pressure. The walls trembled, and dust rattled down.
—On the steps outside the main gate, Zhou Hui looked up at the sky and then said incredulously after a long while, “This… what in the world is this thing?”
The colossal dragon coiled in the void had opened its eyes. Its two vertical pupils were blood-red, and a third eye on its forehead emitted an eerie glow.
It slowly moved its mountain-like body, each inch of movement stirring up a putrid gale. Then, its enormous dragon claws descended from the sky, the airflow overwhelming everything, instantly bending a row of ancient pine trees around the shrine!
Chu He slipped with a bang, then was quickly supported by Zhou Hui and pulled into his embrace.
The dragon’s body was like rolling dark clouds, its head held high, and its three vertical pupils reflected a chilling red light, like three eerie red lanterns in the night sky.
“—It’s resonating with Yan Lanyu’s soul!” Chu He shouted, pressing close to Zhou Hui’s ear, “Yan’s cries woke it up!”
Zhou Hui cursed, “What the hell is this thing?! The Tantric Sect raises something like this, aren’t they afraid of the Japanese race being exterminated?!”
Chu He was about to say something when suddenly the paulownia wood doors of the main hall burst open, and Maha rushed out like lightning.
At this point, his parents could no longer avoid it. The two groups almost collided face-to-face, and Maha and Zhou Hui simultaneously widened their eyes: “You—”
Chu He sharply said, “Be careful!”
With a thunderous crash, the dragon’s body, like a bulldozer, rolled through the air, crashing directly towards the main hall amidst a rain of falling branches and snow, instantly knocking all three of them to the ground.
“What evil are you doing?! What is this thing?!” Zhou Hui asked angrily, picking up Maha by the collar, “You brought this out of the Blood Sea, didn’t you?!”
Maha’s answer was a resounding sword strike. In a flash, Zhou Hui drew his blade from the void to block, and where the blades met, dazzling electrical sparks erupted!
“It has nothing to do with me. I just came to casually eat a few people—as for that dragon, it’s the materialized form of a living person who has fallen into demonhood; human eyes cannot see it.”
The corner of the Peacock Wisdom King’s mouth curled up. In the standoff, the blade reflected a cold light, mirroring the cruel, bloodthirsty smile on his lips: “That’s Amenozume-no-Mikoto after becoming a demon, the current head of the Tantric Sect. So I don’t care whether these humans live or die; it’s their own fault anyway.”
